A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.